Subject: [XCON] Conference Controllers and Mixers

From: rchughes at us.ibm.com (Bob Hughes)
Date: Wed Jul 16 10:18:10 2003

Steve Fisher wrote the following in a note with a different subject header
and I wanted to add a couple of comments in favor of moving the
mixer/controller protocol back in scope.

Rohan,

In your response to Eric you state the following goal for xcon:

"The goal is to allow customers to select a
conferencing application that can work with many vendor's mixers and
conference servers."

I'm puzzled how this goal can be achieved when the protocol between the
application server and the mixers is explicitly out of scope for xcon?
According to the charter, the following is out of scope: "Protocol used
between the conference controller and the mixer(s)."

Steve

Please consider:  if conference participants were in different geographies
(Europe and Aisia, for example) and an enterprise wished to mix in each
geography to minimize traffic between geos, it is unrealistic to think that
the mixer in each geography will always be from the same supplier.  It
seems that a single focus, in this case, is in control of a call with
multiple mixers (probably from different vendors) and the question of
protocol becomes pretty important.

Please consider also:  If the UA has conferencing capability (for, say,
between 3-6 participants) and the user still accesses the conference server
(something that certainly happens in real life as not many people can
handle or be bothered with the key strokes needed to set up conferences on
a phone), shouldn't the focus have the ability to establish the conference
on the UA itself (for small conferences and assuming the conference server
has some awareness of the UA's mixing capability)?  A definition of the
controller/mixer protocol would be useful here, too.  This is a huge thing
for the enterprise as many conferences are small and the investment in UAs
is large.  It seems very desirable if UA based conferencing can be
accomplished in manner indistinguishable from central mixing from the end
user's perspective.

Thanks.

Program Manager, VoIP and Voice/Data Convergence
eBusiness On Demand Transformation;  IT Enablement
914-514-5016:  TL 725-7242

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From: victor at tamura-broad.com (Victor A Paulsamy)
Date: Thu Jul 17 13:21:01 2003

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of Bob Hughes
 
>has some awareness of the UA's mixing capability)?  

[Victor A Paulsamy] Full-mesh conferencing is the best bet!
 
--victor